Nov. 22 (Bloomberg) -- Dismissed as a “nobody” by Japan’s
nuclear industry, seismologist Katsuhiko Ishibashi spent two
decades watching his predictions of disaster come true: First in
the 1995 Kobe earthquake and then at Fukushima. He says the
government still doesn’t get it.

The 67-year-old scientist recalled in an interview how his
boss marched him to the Construction Ministry to apologize for
writing a 1994 book suggesting Japan’s building codes put its
cities at risk. Five months later, thousands were killed when a
quake devastated Kobe city. The book, “A Seismologist Warns,”
became a bestseller.

That didn’t stop Haruki Madarame, now head of Japan’s
Nuclear Safety Commission, from dismissing Ishibashi as an
amateur when he warned of a “nuclear earthquake disaster,” a
phrase the Kobe University professor coined in 1997. Ishibashi
says Japan still underestimates the risk of operating reactors
in a country that has about 10 percent of the world’s quakes.

“What was missing -- and is still missing -- is a
recognition of the danger,” Ishibashi said, seated in a dining
room stacked with books in his house in a Kobe suburb. “I
understand we’re not going to shut all of the nuclear plants,
but we should rank them by risk and phase out the worst.”

Among Japan’s most vulnerable reactors are some of its
oldest, built without the insights of modern earthquake science,
Ishibashi said. It was only in the last four years that Japan
Atomic Power Co. recognized an active fault line running under
its reactor in Tsuruga, which opened in 1970 about 120
kilometers (75 miles) northeast of Osaka and close to a lake
that supplies water to millions of people in the region.

New Fault Lines

Japan Atomic is reinforcing the plant to improve quake
tolerance and believes it’s safe despite the discovery of new
active faults lines in 2008, Masao Urakami, a Tokyo-based
spokesman for the utility, said.

“We can’t respond to every claim by every scientist,” he
said. “Standards for seismic ground motion are not decided
arbitrarily, but are based on findings by experts assigned by
the government.”

Reactor 1 at the Tsuruga plant, which had its license
extended for 10 years in 2009, is one of 13 on Wakasa bay, a
stretch of Sea of Japan coast that is home to the world’s
heaviest concentration of nuclear reactors. The area is riddled
with fault lines found in the last three or four years,
according to Ishibashi.

Energy Review

In the first annual review of energy policy since the
Fukushima disaster, the government on Oct. 28 approved a white
paper calling for reduced reliance on nuclear power. The report
also omitted a section on nuclear power expansion that was in
last year’s review.

The government “regrets its past energy policy and will
review it with no sacred cows,” the report said.

The white paper needs to be followed with action, Ishibashi
said. “Changing the energy policy is a good thing, but I really
do wonder if there will be follow-through,” he said.

Opinion polls show the Fukushima disaster has turned the
majority of Japanese against nuclear power. Companies, meantime,
are worried about higher costs and unstable electricity supply.
The country has no oil reserves and 30 percent of Japan’s
electricity supply came from atomic energy before March 11.

Japan without nuclear energy may add as much as 1.7
trillion yen ($22 billion) a year to the power bill for
industry, the Japan Iron and Steel Federation said in July.

Threat to Move

Komatsu Ltd., the world’s No. 2 maker of construction
machinery, has said it will move overseas if stable electricity
supply isn’t guaranteed. Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda said on
Sept. 2 that some reactors shut down after the March disaster
will have to restart to keep the economy going.

“These plants are a calculated risk,” says Tom Jordan,
director of the Southern California Earthquake Center in Los
Angeles. “Japan has been reasonably thoughtful but they
obviously have problems with earthquakes and they have
underestimated the risks. Still you have to ask the question:
what is the risk of depending on other sources of power?”

Flipping through binders of press clippings in a black T-shirt and grey slacks, Ishibashi said he still remembers his
fear of quakes when he was a boy. He slept with a flashlight
next to his pillow in case he had to escape in the night.

While in college, a magnitude 7.5 earthquake off Japan’s
coast killed dozens in the city of Niigata and sent shock waves
through Ishibashi’s apartment in Tokyo.

Experts Needed

“There was a radio broadcast that night saying Japan
didn’t have enough earthquake experts,” he said, adjusting his
steel-rimmed glasses. “I decided I’d do that.”

It was 1964. Modern seismology was getting started and
Japan was halfway through building its first nuclear reactor. By
the time Ishibashi got his doctorate in seismology from the
University of Tokyo 12 years later, there were 24 reactors
running or under construction, including six at Tokyo Electric
Power Co.’s Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station.

Seismologists at the time still focused on written records,
rather than geological history, for clues about where and when
quakes struck. And it wasn’t until 1977 that mainstream
scientists had the tools to measure the size of quakes like the
magnitude-9 that triggered the Fukushima disaster.

The Richter scale used before then went only to 8.5, or
about 6 times less energy than the March 11 quake.

Significant Damage

“So all of a sudden everyone knew that, hey, there are
magnitude-9 earthquakes in the world,” said Robert Geller, a
professor of geophysics at the University of Tokyo. “They
didn’t know that when they built the nuclear power plants at
Fukushima or other plants from that era. But when that became
known they should have done some rethinking.”

Minutes of a June 2009 trade ministry meeting on safety at
the Fukushima Dai-Ichi plant show Tokyo Electric and the
regulator ignored scientific findings that emerged after the
power station was built.

“We didn’t think the damage would be that significant,”
said Isao Nishimura, a manager at the utility’s nuclear
earthquake resistance technology center, when asked at the
meeting why its safety review omitted studies showing the area
had a history of major earthquakes and tsunami.

Debate was cut short by an official from the Nuclear and
Industrial Safety Agency, according to minutes of the meeting
obtained by Bloomberg News. The regulator approved Fukushima
Dai-Ichi’s safety report a month later, despite studies by
Tohoku University geologist Koji Minoura in the 1990s that
showed giant tsunami had hit Japan’s northeast coast three times
in the last 3,000 years.

Russian Roulette

“That’s about one every 1,000 years on average,” said
Geller. “If you’ve got a plant that runs 50 years, you have a 5
percent chance. You’re talking about Russian roulette.”

Disregard for the science extended to a government panel
started in 2001 to revise seismic engineering standards for
Japan’s nuclear plants, said Ishibashi. He quit the panel after
five years of debate that he called rigged and unscientific.

The revised seismic standards didn’t reflect evidence that
earthquakes could occur in areas where there were no signs of
active faults. The omission allowed the utilities to carry on
without undertaking expensive retrofits, Ishibashi says.

“The point I was trying to make was that if you’re going
to have nuclear plants here in Japan, they should be built to
withstand the most severe shaking that’s been observed,” he
said, recalling the date he resigned from the panel in
exasperation on Aug. 28, 2006. “They tried to chip away at that
as much as they could,” he said.

Worst Case Scenario

Masanori Hamada, a Waseda University engineering professor
who also served on the panel, said there were reasons for not
adopting Ishibashi’s views.

“I understood what Ishibashi was saying, but if we
engineered factoring in every possible worst case scenario,
nothing would get built,” Hamada said. “What engineers look
for is consensus from the seismologists and we don’t get that.”

The Fukushima disaster is forcing a rethink in the U.S.
nuclear industry. A task force for the Nuclear Regulatory
Commission on the disaster recommended in July that U.S.
utilities re-evaluate earthquake hazards every 10 years.

“At this point there is no requirement to re-review basic
seismic design information,” NRC spokesman Scott Burnell said
by e-mail.

In June, Japan’s Nuclear Safety Commission instructed its
experts to review guidelines for earthquake and tsunami defenses
at nuclear plants.

License to Operate

There are no plans to introduce regular seismic reviews as
the U.S. proposes, said a commission official, who was not
authorized to speak to the media and declined to be identified.

“The nuclear industry has tended to give you a license and
then once you have that license you are deemed safe,” said Norm
Abrahamson, a seismologist at the University of California at
Berkeley and an adviser at Pacific Gas & Electric Co., the
state’s biggest utility.

“Nuclear plants are such huge investments that operators
need some assurance of getting their money back,” Abrahamson
said. “They’re looking for what they would call regulatory
stability, but regulatory stability and scientific change don’t
go hand in hand.”

Ishibashi says he didn’t start out as a critic of Japan’s
nuclear industry. In 1976, when the then 31-year-old researcher
at Tokyo University made his first important discovery -- that a
fault line west of Tokyo was much bigger than assumed -- the
risk to Chubu Electric Power Co.’s Hamaoka nuclear plant in
Shizuoka prefecture didn’t occur to him. The plant had opened
that year above the fault.

Fukushima Foretold

His view changed after a magnitude-6.9 quake killed more
than 5,500 people on Jan. 17, 1995, and toppled sections of
elevated expressway.

After a disaster that Japanese engineers had said couldn’t
happen, the nuclear regulator didn’t immediately re-evaluate its
construction standards. It said the plants were “safe from the
ground up,” as the title of a 1995 Science Ministry pamphlet
put it. Ishibashi decided to investigate.

The result was an article on Hamaoka published in the
October 1997 issue of Japan’s Science Journal that reads like a
post-mortem of the Fukushima disaster: A major quake could knock
out external power to the plant’s reactors and unleash a tsunami
that could overrun its 6-meter defenses, swamping backup diesel
generators and leading to loss of cooling and meltdowns.

When the local prefecture questioned industry experts about
Ishibashi’s paper, the response was that he didn’t need to be
taken seriously.

Ishibashi a ‘Nobody’

“In the field of nuclear engineering, Mr. Ishibashi is a
nobody,” Madarame said in a 1997 letter to the Shizuoka
Legislature. Madarame, then a professor at the University of
Tokyo school of engineering, is now in charge of nuclear safety
in the country.

Requests made to Madarame’s office in October for an
interview on his current views of Ishibashi’s work were
declined.

On Oct. 24, Madarame was asked after a regular press
briefing for the commission if he’d changed his opinion about
Ishibashi.

“Because of the accident there’s a need to take another
look at things, including the earthquake engineering guidelines,
and we’re doing that,” he said. “Ishibashi contributed a lot
to the revisions to the earthquake guidelines and his comments
there are important.” He declined to comment further.

Hamaoka’s reactors, the subject of Ishibashi’s 1997 report,
were shut in May after then-Prime Minister Naoto Kan went on
television to publicly plead with Chubu Electric to close the
plant. The utility estimates it will cost 100 billion yen and 18
months to build a seawall around the reactors.

Speaking Engagements

Now Professor Emeritus at Kobe University, Ishibashi said
he hasn’t much time for hiking or other hobbies as his schedule
is packed with speaking engagements.

The message he gives to business leaders and politicians is
the focus on tsunami risk after Fukushima has deflected
attention from the fundamental issue: The danger of having more
than 50 nuclear reactors in one of the world’s most earthquake-prone countries.

At a private meeting with the Kobe Chamber of Commerce at a
Chinese restaurant on July 31, Ishibashi planned to talk through
a slide presentation on the risk associated with the 13 nuclear
reactors on Wakasa Bay up the coast, nine of which are more than
30 years old.

The reactors, which keep factories running for companies
including Panasonic Corp. and Kawasaki Heavy Industries Ltd. as
well as powering the cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe, are in an
area that has had at least five magnitude-7 and magnitude-8
quakes over the last 500 years.

Ishibashi said he got through only a few of his 36 Power
Point slides before his time was up and dinner started. He was
seated at a round table next to the chairman of one of Japan’s
biggest companies, who Ishibashi asked not be identified because
the meeting was private.

“‘I know you want the reactors shut,’” he said the
chairman told him. “‘But it can’t happen. We need the
electricity.’”